Friendster jilts Yahoo for Google

Google has expanded on its ad deal with Friendster by becoming its sole provider of web search ads, pushing Yahoo out of the picture.

Friendster, a social networking website frequented mainly by surfers from Southeast Asia, has already globally integrated Google’s advertising. It is forecast that Google’s display ads based on web search will be integrated in Q2 of this year. Seen as one of the biggest online revenue generators, Google paid out $3.3 billion to its online advertising partners in 2006.

This leaves Yahoo out in the cold, just weeks after launching their advanced ad platform, Panama.

Friendster was one of the first social networking websites and was hot property until MySpace and Facebook arrived on the scene. While Friendster boasts 37 million registered users spanning 75 countries, it has just 1.3 million U.S. visitors, compared with around 61.5 million at MySpace, according to comScore.

Friendster hopes that this new deal with the search giant will generate much needed revenue by improving access to advertisers. "As a top-25 global web brand with 19 million monthly unique visitors and 6 billion page views per month, this agreement with Google allows Friendster to leverage the best industry platform to monetize our high-growth business," said Friendster business development VP Aaron Barnes.